1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information recording medium, an information recording and reproducing apparatus which records or reproduces information on or from the information recording medium, an information recording method which records the information and an information recording program.
2. Description of Related Art
There are known an information recording medium, such as an optical disc and the like, represented by a DVD-R (DVD-Recordable) and a DVD-RW (DVD-Re-recordable), and an information recording and reproducing apparatus capable of recording information on the information recording medium and reproducing the recorded information. So far, since physically re-writing data is impossible on an additionally-recordable-type recording medium capable of recording only once, such as a CD-R and a DVD-R, old file management information (hereafter, it is called “control information data”) remains, and new control information data is additionally recorded for each recording of new data. Further, the control information data is generally updated when the recording medium is ejected. This is because the control information data can be additionally recorded for each recording of the new data, and the newest control information data can be immediately obtained when the recording medium is inserted at next time. However, since the old control information data remains by such an additional recording method of the control information data, storage capacity of the information recording medium is wasted.
Therefore, for example, in a technique which is disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open under No. 2002-238015, only when a predetermined quantity of the data is recorded irrespective of an operation of ejecting the recording medium, the control information data is updated, and thereby the consumption of recording capacity used for the control information data is suppressed.
However, by the above-mentioned additional recording method of the data, since the control information data is updated only when the predetermined quantity of the data is recorded irrespective of the operation of ejecting the disc, the newest control information data is not updated in most cases (i.e., because the recorded data does not always reach the quantity larger than the predetermined quantity) when the data is recorded and ejected. Therefore, when the disc is inserted at next time, the information which is not the newest is obtained in the first place, and the control information data is updated to be the newest one after an actual area searching and the like are performed. Thus, it problematically takes a long time for setup after insertion of the disc.